23 de outubro de 2011

More than half of people working in the industry think sales of e-books will overtake those of their printed counterparts by the end of this decade.

That is among the early findings from The Digital Census 2011, The Bookseller’s annual survey of digital trends and opinions. Responses are still being collected, but provisional figures from the survey show around a quarter (25.8%) forecast that a ‘tipping point’ of sales from print to digital will occur between 2015 and 2019, with smaller numbers predicting it will happen in 2012 (4.9%), 2013 (8.6%) or 2014 (16.4%). The balance of sales will tip sooner in the US but later in other regions of the world, survey respondents suggested.

The lack of diversity in the library ebook marketplace demonstrates an immaturity in how we envision providing access to ebook services. For libraries, it gives us an opportunity to try to craft our own future. COSLA, the consortium of State Librarians, has argued for an ebook lending platform [pdf] that offered ebook access via a national library collective; the Internet Archive has been attempting to buy (not lease) ebooks directly from publishers to support digital lending in a manner analogous to print practice. While neither have taken full wing, both efforts suggest that libraries have the ability to articulate digital futures before they succumb to the entry of ebook retailers that have no history of serving our communities.

Twenty years of the World Wide Web only increased the sale of books. Just a few years after the Kindle was launched e-book sales are accelerating and print sales are plunging. Here are the facts that interest the numbers nerds who follow these things.

Big U.S. publishers are now reporting that e-books now make up between 15 and 20 percent of their sales—a dramatic and quick rise since 2010. But in the rest of the world, it’s a very different story. In the UK, e-books make up about six percent of sales, but that’s as close it gets to U.S. levels. In Germany, Spain, France, and Sweden, e-books account for only 1 percent of book sales; e-book sales in most of Latin America, Asia and Africa are negligible.

European e-book markets are still nascent for several reasons, including a lack of affordable e-readers, high e-book prices, and a scarcity of books in digital formats. Some say it’s just a matter of time before other countries catch up to the U.S. But a new report from O’Reilly Media, “The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections” and discussions at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week suggest that foreign countries won’t necessarily follow an identical but delayed path to widespread e-book adoption.

If one thing is true about Amazon, it's that it thinks long-term. The company's core commerce business wasn't profitable for seven years. Now it's wildly profitable. Amazon began offering cloud services in 2002. Now it's one of the leaders in the sector.

Kindle is a decade-long investment in a media consumption and distribution ecosystem. It's something Amazon can't afford not to do because it needs to disrupt itself. And it's something that can pay off hugely down the road.

According to the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, by 2010, ebooks represented 6.2% of the total unit market share with nearly 112 million units sold, compared to only nine million units sold in 2008. The dramatic growth in digital products is even more impressive when you look at the revenue figures, which grew from $1.88 billion in 2008 to $3.38 billion in 2010, which means that people are increasingly willing to pay for electronic content. Meanwhile, according to the same source, sales of printed books have been declining every year. In the education market, for example, there is steady and growing adoption of all digital formats, including digital databases, e-books, digital curriculum supplements, and mobile applications. This is coming at the expense of printed publications. In the K-12 segment, from 2008 to 2010, printed book revenue was down 13.7%, while revenue from digital formats was up 45%.

This trend represents a true paradigm shift in how we generate and consume information, and it means a significant change in the kinds of tools that we have available for learning and teaching.

Johns Hopkins University Press’s Project MUSE recently announced details about its new ebook collections, including more than 14,000 titles from 66 university presses and scholarly publishers, which are available to order now but won’t be made accessible until January 1, 2012.

The titles are available exclusively as part of 26 separate collections, by subject or by publication year; titles will not be sold individually. Each ebook will be a searchable PDF file, without digital rights management (DRM) or restrictions on simultaneous use, printing, or downloading.

The new Kobo Vox is available for pre-order and offers all the functionality—read books, magazines and newspapers, play games and use apps, listen to music, watch videos and movies—consumers expect from tablet devices. It also looks like B&N’s NookColor has really set the standard for competing in a tablet marketplace utterly dominated by the iPad. B&N’s notion that a seven inch, reasonably priced tablet (half the price of an iPad) with full multimedia functionality; designed for a targeted range of media consumption, seems to have hit a sweet point in the digital marketplace and is driving the development of these new reading/media devices.